Subject: Re: problems booting from floppy
To: David Gilbert <dgilbert@jaywon.pci.on.ca>
From: Randy Terbush <randy@zyzzyva.com>
List: current-users
Date: 03/28/1996 21:27:58
> >>>>> "Randy" == Randy Terbush <randy@zyzzyva.com> writes:
> 
> Randy> This is one I admittedly have not paid much attention to in the
> Randy> past...
> 
> Randy> I'm trying to install NetBSD-1.1 on an IDE drive. Attempts to
> Randy> boot from floppy gets about 3 "turns of the wheel" before the
> Randy> system reboots. I've seen this on other OS installs on other
> Randy> motherboards and it was generally a motherboard timing
> Randy> problem. Any hints as to how to get around it?
> 
> 	I remember seening this as I was trying to install.  However,
> frigging with the hardware long enough made it go away --- so I have
> no idea what it was.
> 
> Dave.

Thanks for the comments.

I did manage to get beyond this by frigging the BIOS, however no
matter how much frigging I do to it (I've even whispered sweet
things to it, and not so sweet) I cannot get it to mount the
floppy as root. Panics right after message "mounting fd0a".

I've enabled and disabled everything I can find. I really think
that I have a flaky motherboard since it has some other peculiarities.
For example, DOS cannot read or write to the harddrive during the
FDISK phase without configuring a phantom IDE drive on the secondary
drive controller. I've thankfully not dealt much with IDE in the
past. I thought they just worked....